Francisco Goya: The Dog ca 1820
There are more than 140 Goya paintings in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but only one of them makes artists pray in front of it even to this day and was asked to be seen by Joan Miró before he died. Some people claim it is the most beautiful picture in the world. This painting has not even a title (Goya painted it for himself not to display), but usually called as “The Dog” or “The half-submerged Dog”.
Francisco de Goya was a genius, the grandfather of modern art. The Spanish artist was way ahead of his time. He was a forerunner of expressionism and surrealism. After he went deaf because of the lead he used in the paint, he isolated himself in the countryside. He decorated all the walls in his house, around the year of 1820, with his so-called “dark paintings.” The dog was one of them, until after seventy years it was necessary to remove it along with the other mural pictures and was transferred to canvas.
The painting is beautiful because of its simplicity: We see a black dog`s face in the lower part of the picture, nothing else. The space is divided in two: a dirty, golden-yellow upper side and a darker brown lower side.
In person, the most powerful thing in the painting is the poor dog’s gaze. He is looking upward to someone or something we cannot see, someone who could help him. But this person is not there so the whole scene is very sad in that way. It is a hopeless situation. There is no way out. The minimalist setting emphasizes the dog’s helpless status. He is alone.
Art historians use to consider this picture as the first symbolist painting. It symbolizes the inevitable fact, the upcoming death.
Despite the fact that the mural picture lost a significant amount of paint when it was removed from the wall, it has a powerful texture. The ochre or dirty yellow color pretty much rules the scene. It is like a giant who lies heavy on the poor creature. The yellow texture has a deepness that could swallow everything. The lower brown part also has a powerful value. It looks like a threatening, muddy wave that might wash the dog away any second.
The minimal use of color, object and line make the painting harmonious. The only visible line is the brown part’s horizontal upper line heading up on the right side; however, there is another one but less significant line right next to the dog, vertically dividing the space in lighter and darker color, but fading away soon. Only it is not a line.
I discovered, that sometime around 1863, a French photographer J. Laurent took a picture of the half-submerged dog when it was still on the wall in Goya’s house. It shows that the darker shadow on the right was a much darker and bigger something, still not recognizable. It seems to me that it is a cliff, where the dog wistfully looks. In the black and white picture there are seemingly two little birds hovering above the maybe-cliff.
Anyhow, by today, without the birds and the cliff, damaged and disturbed, the painting still has the same meaning.
For me, there is another vertical, imaginary line: the dog’s gaze. This line is invisible but sensible so much that the audience can feel it. Without knowing about the photo’s existence, I thought the dog was looking up the line waiting for a divine miracle.
I too stood nearly half an hour in front of this picture, like Miró, looking at the dog’s sorrowful gaze. I like imagining someone outside the composition, a person who happened to be there, who pulled the dog out of the swamp, stroked him and made him comfortable. As much as I know Goya’s dark attitude to life, I still like to believe that the dark shadow in the yellow sky is not a cliff but a decent fellow, who only disappeared from the painting over the centuries.